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Comment by oliyoung | Hacker News Reader

> Since 2019, every new Subaru has come standard with both Apple CarPlay® and Android Auto™

https://www.subaru.com/vehicle-info/article/what-is-apple-ca...

Infotainement is more than just CarPlay.

I don't know if it's gotten any better, but I won't buy another Subaru after my 2020. It constantly beeps at me whenever the EyeSight can't see the lanes in the road, even when it's not steering for me. It's a safety hazard that pretends to be a safety feature.

Can't you turn eyesight off?

I can but I actually like the safety it provides. It just doesn’t need to loudly distract me every time it momentarily stops.

do you enjoying having to accept the popup disclaimer literally every single time you start the car? i sure do, love it, what a UX

Nobody has to accept that disclaimer even a single time. I never have. Most times its disappeared before I ever get a chance to have to do anything on the screen. I just start driving :shrug:

That disclaimer is both worthless and such an annoyance

even worse! why bother with it at all. really "fuck you thats why" levels of UX design.

Sounds more like either an actual compliance or preventative CYA compliance thing if you ask me.

If they think they need to show you this (for whatever reason, their legal department said so), then it has nothing to do with bad UX design but really, being in between a rock and a hard place. If my legal team made me do this, I'd also show it every single time, because you have zero guarantee that the person driving the car this time is the same person that saw and accepted the dialog the last time. Even if you think about "driver profiles", that totally goes out the window in a rental car scenario for sure and even in a non-rental one, not everyone that has a car that has "driver profiles" will make use of the feature.

So as a dev I would show this for whatever period of time legal required me to show it, to CYA for the above cases and then I'd just close it because I don't want to annoy people so much as to actually require an actual "click" on the accept button.

as a dev that presumably cares about the product i work on, I would look at every other car that somehow manages not to do this obnoxious useless thing, and argue till i'm blue in the face with my compliance folk that its a stupid ask. I might not win, but id sure try.

Im guessing its the opposite - the devs involved in this were probably outsourced (famously legacy car manufacturers do this, its all cobbled together external chunks), and didnt give a shit at all. Closed the jira task for compliance and moved on without a second thought. This is why Subaru and other legacy car companies make such atrocious UX.

And then there's the unexpectedly high cost if you ever need to replace your windshield.

Interesting how Infotainment crosses into EyeSight for you though. That's not at all what that means.

And yes it beeps and you can't turn the beeping off completely. It's supposed to annoy you into using the blinkers properly. Different cars/model years seem to have different levels of annoyingness in the actual beep and different volume settings available though.

My (also 2020) never beeps when EyeSight can't see the lanes, whether its steering or not. It beeps when you cross a line without blinking or you're crossing the lines and would soon be driving on the shoulder/into the trees. It does sometimes have issues where it beeps a bit too early, i.e. it seems the calculations from the visuals are a bit off in certain situations.

It’s the screen yelling at me so I consider it part of the same system. It’s not about the blinkers it just turns off frequently because there are poor lane markings where I live. Besides that the rest of the UI is slow and annoying. I can never remember which sub menu different annoying beeps are under. Carplay is much slower too than in other cars.

YMMV as always. I don't even notice the visuals. The lane change alerts at least in the two Subarus I've had that had EyeSight already have it on the main dash, i.e. the small screen not the big Infotainment screen in the middle console.

I don't get the "turning off because lane markings" comment tbh and we got some pretty bad ones here as well, especially in winter (i.e. often none at all :) Are we talking completely different things or did they change anything past 2024 models (last one I know)?

Coz EyeSight does not turn off just because there are no markings. It turns off if it can't see, i.e. too much rain, smudgy glass in front of the cameras etc. It doesn't care about the lane markings just to follow the car in front of me. But sure if it can't find the lane markings then I can't enable the auto-steering (which I find way too janky anyway - pretty annoying that it seems to steer left and right between the markings instead of holding steady in the middle and adjusting smoothly, so I never use it).

I can never remember where settings I touch exactly once to set them up either. For any car. Set it and forget it.

No experience with carplay but Android Auto support does depend a lot on the phone. My older Motorola and Samsung phone always sucked, often didn't connect at all with most cables. Since I got a Pixel, zero problems at all.

I’m just describing my experience as accurately as I can. I wouldn’t buy another Subaru.

I live on a narrow-ish rural road with no fog line on the shoulder, and drove a 2024 Outback. It definitely did this constantly. It was fixed in the 2025 model (no idea if it got backported to the older cars), and does it less, but still does it.

Btw if you've got eyesight it means you can buy comma.ai (not cheap) which is after market not quite self driving so it steers and gas/brakes for you.

(not sponsored)

I've got a 2020 XV (Australian Crosstrek nameplate) and it has relatively few annoying EU-mandated safety features.

It won't start unless I've done my seatbelt up, which is annoying when I'm e.g. driving in a cow paddock at 10km/h and trying to get through multiple gates, but it doesn't do lane assist or have a driver-facing camera or anything like that.

It's terrible to drive a Subaru with all their safety shit. Turn on the adaptive cruise, and change lanes when approaching a slower car? The Subaru will slam on the brakes thinking you're going to hit the car, even though you're totally clear of it. Really safe to slam on the brakes when merging into a faster lane.

Also, it locks onto cars taking the offramp... and as they slow down, you'll be in an empty right lane going 45mph. I've driven a 2024, and a 2025, and the 2025 has way less false alarms, but it still drives me crazy.

Oh yeah, and my favorite thing about adaptive cruise, is how you come to a stop in traffic, and the cruise control just turns off, but only after you're stopped for more than 15 seconds of so. Then it beeps at you telling you the car in front of you is moving. Thanks dickhead, how about you just accelerate and follow the car then like you would do if you only stopped for 5 seconds?

And not to mention, with the steering on, and my hands on the wheel, it bitches at me to put my hands on the wheel. MY HANDS ARE ON THE WHEEL. The only way to get it to realize your hands are on the wheel is to turn the damn steering wheel just a tiny bit, and let it fight back against you the whole time.

Total fucking garbage.

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